I have this ex-professor who has fallen down the patriarchal misogyny rabbit hole hard. He would disagree vehemently, at least with the misogyny part, but his last major book was a thinly veiled “satirical” allusion to the horrors of women in positions of authority in the work place, and it is transparent how much he was just really writing his true feelings about the department that he used to teach in and I was in. At least, that is what comes across in every excerpt he shares from it, and even when he thinks he is showing any kind of nuance or complex perspective, the text he points to never delivers. This book was not this teachers first foray into misogyny, and multiple Fem presenting students had stories about him tending to dismiss them as writers or encouraging them to use their “feminine guiles” to seek professional success instead of acknowledging the strength of their work.
I have tried to engage with this professor in his descent into patriarchal misogyny, transphobia, islamophobia, and white supremacy, because it felt, at first, like a descent from a position of moderate “liberal” leftism, but it is becoming more and more clear that this was less of a shift, than a position that might have been inevitable for a long time, but wasn’t necessary to express until white male complacent mediocrity was no longer going to be enough to keep him feeling secure in the work place or in his social relationships with women.
These are really harsh words and the truth I need to commit to is that I can’t see inside this ex-professor’s head or know what made his rhetoric change so vehemently. I can only really address and respond to the things he is saying and writing now, which tend to be the parroting of hot topics in the manosphere and Steve Bannon-esque right-wing fringe media, often with poorly researched evidence. When he is called out on a particularly poorly presented argument, his response to refutation is to refer to “classical liberal” philosophers and psychologists who usually just insist that western culture is the pinnacle of human achivement, and that all society must embrace a form of competitive individualism that only really rewards competences in western cultural productions. Or, if he has jumped onto a flimsy enough right-wing conspiracy that has publicly fallen apart in the media within days of his choice to write about it, then he completely abandons the topic to move on to the next “wokest outrage.” Occasionally, I still see the hint of the keen intellect that turned me on to authors like Louis Borges and Milan Kundera, especially in acknowledging that neoliberal, capitalist leftism was a house of cards built global exploitation, and that it requires state violence (both international and intranational) to maintain itself. But while I find that to be a fatal flaw in capitalism, my ex-professor has decided to embrace that flaw as natural fact (as has Trumpism and much of today’s far right) and encourage nationalistic protectionism and the authoritarian repression of non-governmental institutions that question the superiority of patriarchal western society.
It would be very natural for me to want to question why someone who identifies as a working class bloke is siding with people like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are transparently just in to turn their wealth into political power so that they can make more money…except this is the exact same turn used by the monarchs of Europe through the beginning of their colonial periods and most other expansionistic Empires throughout history. The promise that every man can be the king of his own kingdom, as long as they commit themselves fully to the glory of the Empire has been one of the most effective motivational lies in authoritarian history:
“Sure you might be degraded and dehumanized in the work that you are doing and the in the prospects of real social empowerment, but if you stick it out with us, we are going to let you get away with taking out your frustrations on your own personal family for as long as we possibly can, and as long as you don’t draw too much attention to how messed up this is.”
Young or old, it sure does seem like a lot of men take the biggest leaps into anti-social (at least anti-pluralistic society) and patriarchal misogyny when the ghost of being the current or future patriarch of their own family is taken away from them. I don’t know if this was exactly the case with my ex-professor, but I have seen it often enough to be suspicious in most circumstances where a self-identified man has a relationship end badly. It is absolutely astonishing that so many men have managed to convince themselves that men have rational and evidence-based minds when it is so confoundingly irrational to think that anyone suppressing emotional confusion or distress is capable of rational thought.